The Invention of the White Race, Volume 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America
Jeffrey B. Perry
Language: English
Pages: 422
ISBN: 1844677702
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, Martin Luther King outlined a dream of an America where people would not be judged by the color of their skin. That dream has yet to be realized, but some three centuries ago it was a reality. Back then, neither social practice nor law recognized any special privileges in connection with being white. But by the early decades of the eighteenth century, that had all changed. Racial oppression became the norm in the plantation colonies, and African Americans suffered under its yoke for more than two hundred years.
In Volume II of The Invention of the White Race, Theodore Allen explores the transformation that turned African bond-laborers into slaves and segregated them from their fellow proletarians of European origin. In response to labor unrest, where solidarities were not determined by skin color, the plantation bourgeoisie sought to construct a buffer of poor whites, whose new racial identity would protect them from the enslavement visited upon African Americans. This was the invention of the white race, an act of cruel ingenuity that haunts America to this day.Allen’s acclaimed study has become indispensable in debates on the origins of racial oppression in America. In this updated edition, scholar Jeffrey B. Perry provides a new introduction, a select bibliography and a study guide.
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Among those who moved and moved frequently were those who opted for being tenants,113 some on leases but, says Kulikoff, more typically as tenants-at-will, working on shares with tools, buildings and marketing facilities furnished by the landlord. Share tenants moved on after a short tenure. Squatters left land where they could not afford the surveying and patent fees; two-thirds of the original settlers of Amelia County, formed in 1735 – mostly squatters – left the county between 1736 and 1749.
World, 1676–1701 (Chapel Hill, 1963), pp. 128–9. 29. See Chapter 3, especially pp. 40–45. 30. Hening, 1:396 (1656); 1:410 (1655); 1:455–6 (1658); 1:481–2 (1658); 1:546 (1660). 31. Hening, 2:143 (1662). 32. Hening, 2:283. 33. Hening, 2:346. 34. Hening, 2:404 (February 1677). 35. Hening, 2:492–3. This 1682 law resulted in the “importation of many more Indian slaves than has usually been recognized.” (Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia [New.
List of tithables. 93. Accomack County Records, 1678–82, pp. 271, 295–6. How much was Griffin’s attitude different from that of two bond-laborers who nearly beat to death a James “a Scotchman” whom their owner had appointed to be their overseer? Northampton County Records, 1664–74, p. 61 (1 March 1668/9). 94. York County Records, 1677–84, pp. 360, 362–4 (2 December 1681). It is not absolutely clear whether the “he” in Wells’s remark referred to himself or to Frank. What is not in doubt is that.
Whose names are prominent in the extensive bibliography of the “safety valve” controversy. Subsequently it could only be defended in a greatly watered-down form of the original Turner formulation. See Ray Allen Billington, The American Frontier Thesis: Attack and Defense (Washington, DC, 1971, pp. 20–25, and idem, America’s Frontier Heritage, pp. 31–8, 292–3. 124. I borrow here the title of a well-known work of William Appleman Williams, The Contours of American History (New York, 1988;.
Bond-laborers was more than compensated by the accumulation of interest on the freedom dues, or even the avoidance of the payment of this terminal allowance in an assured percentage of cases.149 But the most attractive part of the labor maintenance picture, as viewed by the employer, was the fact that the workers produced their own food. Of course, a portion of the laborers’ time had to be given to the work, but that could not be considered a loss of labor, any more than waiting for a wet day to.